A Shameful Life Read online

  That was all I said and that was all that needed to be said. I had won the all-or-nothing bet, and, perhaps a bit too aggressively, had made a place for myself on the second floor of the bar. Yet, society—that “society” I was supposed to regard with such trepidation—did not inflict the slightest injury upon me. Nor did I attempt to defend or justify myself to “society.” So long as the Madam was willing, that was all that mattered.

  I was part customer, part owner, part errand boy, and part relative. To an outsider I suppose I must have seemed an odd creature indeed, but “society” didn’t pay the slightest heed to me, and the regulars were all terribly kind, calling out, “Yō-chan, Yō-chan” and buying me drinks.

  The sense of caution I had maintained toward the world gradually began to fade. It might not be such a terrifying place after all. The terror that had so consumed me before seemed now more like superstition. Like the “scientific myths” that the spring winds carry millions of whooping cough germs, or that the public baths teem with bacteria that make you go blind, the millions of germs in a barbershop that cause baldness, handle straps in trains contaminated with scabies, undercooked pork and beef, sashimi infested with tapeworm, flatworm and so on, that if you stepped barefoot on a tiny shard of glass it would find its way into your bloodstream and put out your eye. “Scientifically,” I am sure there are millions of bacteria floating and swimming about wherever we go. I came to realize, however, that all we needed do was ignore these facts entirely and they lost their hold over us, vanishing entirely in the end, reduced to nothing more than “scientific ghosts.” Just as when people go on about how if you throw away three grains of rice with your lunch and ten million other people do the same then so many bushels of rice are wasted, or when they say that if ten million people conserved just one tissue each day then so many tons of pulp would be saved, and so on. How terrified I used to be of this kind of “scientific accounting.” Whenever I wasted so much as a single grain of rice, each time I blew my nose I was haunted by visions of a mountain of rice, of mountains of pulp going to waste. I grew despondent, as if I’d committed some terrible crime. Yet, in the end, these were but “scientific lies,” “statistical lies,” “mathematical lies.” Nobody was going to go around and collect each of those three grains of rice. Even purely as an intellectual exercise in mathematics it was a silly, primitive notion—no better those idiotic statistics exercises where one calculates the probability of a person tripping in the dark and falling into the toilet or the number of passengers who would get a leg stuck in the gap between train and platform. They sound plausible enough, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting hurt by falling into the toilet. I was gradually learning to see the world for what it was, and I wanted to laugh at myself for having lived in such terror of these hypotheticals, of these “scientific facts” that had been drilled into me and which I had taken as real.

  All that was true, but people still scared me and I had to fortify myself with a drink before meeting them, even customers in the bar. After all, I’d seen terrifying things. Yet I still went out to the bar each night, drank with them, and even argued absurd theories of art with them. I was like the child who, frightened of an animal, will run up to it and hug it all the tighter for all that.

  A cartoonist. Ah, I was but an unknown cartoonist with neither great joy nor great sadness. I secretly ached for a great, violent joy and to hell with whatever sadness might follow, no matter how terrible it might be. But my only joys, if they can be called such, were getting embroiled in pointless debates with the customers and drinking their liquor.

  This tedious life at Kyōbashi continued for nearly a year, and I was now selling my cartoons to other magazines too—not just children’s magazines. I drew for the cheap, dirty magazines you find at station newsstands. I drew coarse nudes under the absurd pen name of “Jōshi Ikita” (a homophone for “survived love suicide”), appending a verse from The Rubaiyat to each.

  Why not abandon your futile prayers

  And cast off those worries that invite tears

  Come now, let’s drink and talk of fond memories

  Forgetting a while our cares.

  People who menace with worry and terror,

  Trembling before their imagined sins

  Forever scheming and plotting

  Against the spirits’ vengeance.

  Yester eve, stomach full of wine and heart full of joy

  The morn stirs, so bleak and desolate

  How treacherous the night

  To thus my feelings break.

  Forget the damnation to come

  That haunts us with dim fear

  Like the echo of a distant drum

  The tallying of petty sins behooves none.

  Is it righteousness, then, that is man’s compass?

  Yet, what justice then lies

  In the blood-soaked battlefield

  Or on the tip of an assassin’s knife?

  Where have the guiding principles gone?

  What profound wisdom now lights the way?

  It is both beautiful and terrible, this floating world.

  We but delicate children, forced to bear the unbearable.

  Always the seed of desire is planted, yet with it we can do naught.

  Good, Bad, Sin, Punishment, so we are cursed.

  Always wandering, helpless.

  Never permitted the strength of will to crush it.

  Where and why do you wander?

  What do you censure, survey, remember?

  Ha! It is but an empty dream, a feeble illusion

  Aha! We forget our wine, all is idle musing.

  Gaze up now at the boundless sky!

  There, a tiny speck floating within.

  As if we could know why the earth spins.

  Spin, whirl, or roll over—it shall do as it likes.

  Everywhere I go, I sense unrivaled power.

  On every land, in every people,

  I discover the same humanity.

  Could it be that I am the heretic?

  All misread the holy book

  Else they lack wisdom and sense,

  To forbid the wine, to forgo the pleasures of living flesh,

  Do as you will, Mustafa. Such things I detest.

  It was around this time that a young girl urged me to stop drinking.

  “You can’t go on like this. Drunk by noon every day.”

  Her name was Yoshiko, though I called her Yoshi-chan, and she worked at a tiny tobacconist across the street from the bar. About seventeen or eighteen, she was pale-skinned with slightly crooked teeth. She smiled and offered the same warning each time I went to buy cigarettes.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with it? As they said in ancient Persia, ‘Drink all the wine, dear child, and dispel hatred—Away! Away!’ Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The jade chalice of oblivion, as the poet says, is the only hope for this heart, heavy and worn with sorrow. You see?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why you—keep it up and I’ll kiss you.”

  “Go on then,” she said with a pout, not looking remotely abashed.

  “You idiot. No notion of chastity . . .”

  Yet from her expression, it was clear that she remained a virgin, untouched by any man.

  On one particularly cold night after New Year’s I got drunk and went to buy cigarettes when I fell into an open manhole right in front of the tobacconist. I cried out to Yoshi-chan for help, and she pulled me out and tended the cut on my right arm. “You drink too much,” she said, unsmiling, her voice thick with emotion.

  The thought of dying didn’t bother me in the slightest, but when it came to injuries, bleeding and the like, I wanted none of it. As she cleaned the cut on my arm I started to think that perhaps I really had better stop drinking.

  “I’ll give it up. From tomorrow. I won’t touch a drop of the stuff.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll quit. And if I do you’ll be my bride, right?”

  I’d meant the bi
t about her being my bride as a joke.

  “OC!”

  “OC” was short for “of course.” Like “mobo” for modern boy and “moga” for modern girl, abbreviating things was all the rage back then.

  “All right, shake on it then. I’m definitely quitting.”

  Of course, I’d started drinking again by noon the next day.

  That evening I stumbled outside and made my way over to Yoshi-chan’s shop.

  “Yoshi-chan, sorry! I got drunk again.”

  “What’s this? That’s not very nice, pretending to be drunk!”

  I gasped. I even started to feel sober.

  “But it’s true. I’m not pretending—I really am drunk.”

  “You shouldn’t tease me, it’s not nice,” she said, guilelessly.

  “But all you have to do is look at me. I started drinking at noon today, too. Forgive me?”

  “You put on a good act, don’t you?”

  “I’m not acting, you idiot! Keep it up and I’ll kiss you!”

  “Go on, then.”

  “No, I don’t have the right to. I must abandon my plan of taking you as my bride. Look at me—my face is red, right? I’m drunk.”

  “That’s just from the sunset. You can’t fool me. You promised to stop drinking yesterday so you can’t be drunk. We even shook on it. I don’t believe you. You’re lying. Lies, lies, lies!”

  I stood there gazing at her pale, smiling face, glowing in the dim light of the shop. How precious, I thought. This unsullied virginity. I’d never slept with a virgin younger than myself before. We should marry. Let whatever sadness comes, come, I don’t care how terrible it is. Just once in my life I want to feel a great, violent joy. I’d always thought that “beautiful virginity” was simply a sentimental conceit employed by feeble-minded poets, but now I could see that it really did exist. In that instant I decided we’d marry, and in the springtime we’d ride our bicycles to a waterfall deep in the forest. It was an all-or-nothing bet, so, without a moment’s hesitation, I stretched out my hand and snatched the flower.

  We married soon thereafter, and while the joy I gained was modest, the sadness—no, even the word misery falls short of the mark— that came after was terrible beyond all imagining. “The world,” it seems, really was an infinitely terrifying place after all. It is certainly not the amiable sort of place where everything is decided with a single throw of the dice.

  Part Two

  Horiki and myself.

  To scorn one another, to reduce one another to mediocrity. If this is what is meant by “friendship” then Horiki and I were the epitome of “friends.”

  Thanks entirely to the chivalry of the Madam from Kyōbashi (it may sound odd to speak of chivalry in a woman but experience has taught me—at least in the city—that women possess the quality of what I can only call chivalry in far greater quantities than men. Men, as a rule, are cowardly, trembling creatures who care for nothing but appearances and are stingy to boot), I succeeded in making Yoshiko my common-law wife. We rented a small room in eastern Tokyo on the first floor of a tiny two-story apartment in Tsukiji, near the Sumida River. I quit drinking and dedicated myself to what was, it seemed, becoming my chosen path—cartoons. After dinner we went to the movies and on the way home stopped at a coffee shop or bought a flower pot and so on. More than anything, I loved to simply listen to her and to gaze at her, this woman who trusted me to the very core of her being. It was around then that I started to think that I might, just possibly, be turning into something that resembled a human being. I began to feel a faint, warm hope that I might avoid a miserable death after all, when Horiki reappeared at my doorstep.

  “Hey pervert! Well, now—what’s this? Could you be turning respectable? I come bearing tidings from the Lady of Kōenji,” he began but suddenly dropped his voice. He gave a jerk of his chin in the direction of Yoshiko in the kitchen, as though to see if it was safe to talk.

  “It’s fine. You can say whatever you like,” I replied calmly.

  Indeed, I think Yoshiko had a divine gift for trusting people. She never suspected anything about my relationship with the Madam from Kyōbashi, and even when I told her about the Kamakura incident she didn’t believe there had been anything between Tsuneko and me. Not because I was a particularly gifted liar. Sometimes I even made a point of speaking as frankly and candidly as I could, but she just dismissed everything as a joke.

  “Well, I can see you’re doing well for yourself—same as always. In any case, it’s nothing important. She just wanted me to tell you to come and visit her sometime.”

  Just as I am on the verge of forgetting, that winged monster dives, its beak ripping open the scab of memory. Vivid images of past sins and past shames suddenly unfold before my eyes and I grow so terrified that I want to scream. I can’t sit still.

  Me: “Go for a drink?”

  Horiki: “Sure.”

  Me and Horiki. Cast from the same mold. We are, I sometimes thought, all but indistinguishable from one another. This only held true when we were together drinking cheap liquor; when we went out we transformed into the same dog with the same coat of fur, sniffing around the snowy alleys of the red-light district.

  From that day we rekindled our old friendship, we’d go back to the tiny Kyōbashi bar, too and, in the end, we two drunken dogs would find our way back to Shizuko’s apartment in Kōenji, sometimes even spending the night there before heading home in the morning.

  I will never forget. It was a hot, muggy summer evening. Sometime around sunset Horiki showed up at our apartment wearing a threadbare yukata. Due to “various circumstances” he’d pawned his summer clothes, but there would be trouble if his mother found out so he needed to redeem them as soon as possible and would I lend him the money? Unfortunately, we didn’t have any money either, so, as was my usual practice, I sent Yoshiko off to pawn some of her clothes and, as the sum she received was slightly more than what Horiki required, I had her buy some shōchū liquor with the rest and we went up to the roof where we bathed in the feeble, muddy breeze that occasionally wafted in from the Sumida River and held a thoroughly squalid summer banquet.

  We played a game of my own invention that consisted of categorizing nouns as either “comic” or “tragic.” Just as nouns were divided into masculine, feminine, neutral, and so on, I thought it only proper that they should also be divided into the comic and the tragic. For example, steamer and steam locomotive are both tragic nouns whereas bus and streetcar are comic. Why? If you have to ask then clearly you are not qualified to discuss such weighty matters of art. Just as a playwright who allowed so much as a single tragic noun to find its way into a comedy would be scorned, so too would a tragedy that contained a comic noun.

  “Ready? How about tobacco?” I asked.

  “Trag (our abbreviation for tragedy),” Horiki said almost before I finished.

  “Medicine?”

  “Powder or pills?”

  “Injections.”

  “Trag.”

  “Really? It might just be a hormone injection.”

  “No, trag. Absolutely trag. Come on, it’s the needles—could anything be more trag?”

  “All right, you win. But, you know, medicine and doctors—they’re actually com (our abbreviation for comedy). What about death?”

  “Com. Pastors and Buddhist priests, too.”

  “Bravo. So, I suppose that life is trag.”

  “No, that’s com too.”

  “No, if we do that then everything will be com. All right, I’ll try one more, then. Cartoonist. Surely that can’t be com.”

  “Tragedy, tragedy. An epic tragedy.”

  “What’s that? Surely you’re the epic tragedy.”

  There was nothing remarkable about our feeble wordplay but, at the time, it seemed to us a most refined amusement, the likes of which had never graced the finest salons of the world—and we were absurdly proud of it.

  Around the same time I’d invented another, similar game where the players had to
guess the antonyms for words. The ant (an abbreviation for antonym) for black was white. However, the ant for white was red and the ant for red, black.

  “What’s the ant for flower?” I asked.

  Horiki frowned slightly as he considered. “Well, there’s a restaurant called ‘Moon and Flowers’ so it must be moon.”

  “No, no. That’s not an ant. If it’s anything, it’s a synonym. Among the poets even stars and violets are synonyms, right? Not ants.”

  “OK, OK. Then, let’s see . . . bees!”

  “Bees?”

  “‘Atop the peonies . . . ’ as the poem goes. . . . Or was it an ant?”

  “Come now, that’s a motif—you can’t fool me.”

  “I’ve got it! ‘Gathering clouds obscure the flowers . . . ’”

  “It’s supposed to be ‘Gathering clouds obscure the moon.’”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. A wind scatters the flowers. It’s the wind. The ant of flowers is the wind.”

  “I don’t like it. It sounds like something you’d get from a wandering minstrel. Your true colors are starting to show.”

  “No, I’ve got it—it’s the loquat. Same shape as your minstrel’s lute.”

  “That’s even worse. The ant for flowers . . . What is the one thing in the world that is most unlike flowers? That’s what you need to find . . .”

  “In that case . . . hang on. I’ve got it! It’s ‘woman.’”

  “And while you’re at it, the synonym for woman is?”

  “Tripe.”

  “You, it seems, are wholly ignorant of the art of poesy. Give us the ant for tripe, then.”

  “Milk.”

  “That’s not half bad. One more in that vein, then: shame. What’s the ant?”

  “Shameless. The famous cartoonist, Jōshi Ikita.”

  “What about Horiki Masao?”

  Our laughter gradually began to fade as we succumbed to that mood particular to shōchū, that gloomy drunkenness, where your head feels like it is filled with shards of broken glass.

  “Don’t be a smart aleck. At least I’ve never been marched across the city with a rope tied about my waist.”